The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time Mark Haddon Book
by Mark Haddon

In the popular mind, autistic people are often thought to be lacking in social skills and emotions; they're unable to cope with ambiguity; they need life to be straightforward, linear, timetabled. They have difficulty understanding normal standards of social communication and can find figurative language, metaphors and the like, confusing.

What an autistic person wants most in life is to follow a list of things in logical order. Rationality please at all times! could be their motto. If the unexpected happens they can become agitated and, in extreme cases, throw a wild tantrum or two.

In Mark Haddon's book, when autistic teenager Christopher Boone discovers a dead dog with a fork sticking out of it one night in next door's garden, he is so overcome he has to write a book about it. Christopher being Christopher, he creates what amounts to a sophisticated list to help him get to the bottom of the mystery. It's a sincere timeline of a reluctant yet determined detective.

'And that's why everything I have written here is true.'

Mark Haddon's triumph as a writer is to bring the mind of Christopher into the reader's reality in a simple, convincing way. He writes mostly short sentences and intersperses them with some basic mathematics, logic and autistic sensibility. There's loads of humour, misunderstandings and anxiety as the young sleuth goes about his business.

And be warned, there are many, perhaps too many, sentences starting with 'And' or 'And then', but the style does reflect the mentality of the narrator and the quality is strong enough to maintain the tension throughout. What emerges, for the first time in the world of fiction, is a first-person account of what it means to be on the autistic spectrum.

In this sense, the book is a must read because it opens us up to the possibility of empathy with and understanding of individuals who don't slot neatly into a standard box. And the story cracks on at a pace, avoiding pure bathos, leaving the reader in no doubt that a certain Christopher Boone will do whatever's necessary to solve the mystery, despite a broken family, lies, an assault on a police officer and the importance of prime numbers.

But what about the reaction of real people with autism who read the book? According to some, the author has brought the issue of autism out into the open, which is a good thing. In the opinion of others, he has created a stereotypical monster, ignoring the fact that autistic people are individuals with different personalities.

First question: Does Mark Haddon's book do justice to autistic people? Second question: Does it portray autistic people as stereotypically unemotional, either low or high functioning? Third question: Are the first two questions irrelevant? Go figure, discuss, debate.

Whatever your conclusion, this book is unusual in that it places a vulnerable member of society centre stage. Christopher Boone is continually challenged to work out his perspective on life and goes through many mental pain barriers in the process. He swings between comedy and tragedy like an untrained circus trapeze artist, learning as he goes, losing it one minute, regaining it the next. Christopher's traumatic journey is, hopefully, therapeutic, for both him and the reader.